Software defined networking presents a standards based control and data plane solution for building the next generation data centers. For example, the Application Centric Infrastructures provided by Cisco® is a software defined networking solution designed to automate, configure, and manage data center fabrics, and have become popular in enterprise data center environments. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Technology, Inc. The Programmable Fabric provided by Cisco® is a software defined network solution that leverages the standards-based Multi-Protocol Border Gateway Protocol (MP-BGP) Ethernet Virtual Private Networking (EVPN) as the underlying control plane to optimize traffic flow and scale-out virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) fabrics. That is, the Programmable Fabric employs VXLAN for the data plane and MP-BGPEVPN for the control plane. The EVPN address family carries both Media Access Control (MAC) and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the tenant hosts, thereby ensuring that forwarding is dictated by the information fed by the control plane, enhancing scalability. These abilities address the disadvantages of flood-and-learn based data plane solutions.